Review: Music On: Electric Guitar (3DS eShop)

When was the last time you saw someone casually carrying around an electric guitar? While a budding musician would benefit from practicing their craft on the go, it simply isn't worth the hassle of lugging around a guitar, even without an amp. This is where Music On: Electric Guitar largely succeeds, as it provides a quick and painless way for musicians to strum away on the go.

With Music On: Electric Guitar, Abylight provides most of the basic tools a guitar player could ask for considering the low price. It is worth mentioning up front that this app is simply a tool, not a tutorial. Inexperienced and new electric guitar players aren't provided with any sort of explanation in-game as to how the app works, which narrows the potential audience quite a bit.

The standard display has a fretboard along the top screen with a set of six strings along the bottom screen. Dragging the stylus across a string causes it to play based on the speed you strum at, much like a real guitar. This is really the bulk of where you'll be when using this app, and it is presented nice and cleanly, and works well.

Playing gets more technical when you throw the D-Pad into the mix (no left handed controls are available in this title, sorry Jimi Hendrix style-players) which allows you to set a chord. Chords appear on the top screen, and by strumming the strings you now play the chord, exactly like a real electric guitar, or as close as a 3DS can come anyway.

The more in-depth content of Music On: Electric Guitar is found in the four buttons on the touch screen, the first of which is a handy guide to how to play certain chords. This is very useful in the long run and can be used as a nice guide to double check what you're doing.

The next button down produces a seven fret fretboard, allowing you to play chords on different steps, each fret being a half-step difference from the one next to it. Without a chord selected, this is the closest the game comes to an actual electric guitar- so play to your heart's content.

Button number three displays a selection of pedals for you to choose from, Delay, Distortion and Flanger. While you might be skeptical, all three of these do truly work like their real counterparts, and provide the realistic effects you'd want. This area also has multiple knobs to use to adjust each criteria, and an option to have auto-strumming in the background to judge how it will sound.

The fourth option is simply to save your current selection of chords for easy recovery, and saves a bit of time in the long run. While all of these features are great, they aren't explained at all in the app, which leads to some trial and error to figure them out. A simple popup menu with explanations of each button would really benefit the title and help players get right into the action.

As it stands, Music On Electric Guitar does exactly what it wants to do, and provides a solid electric guitar app for players on the go. Unfortunately, this is a very small group of players, and having an in-game tutorial on how to play would have been the ideal packaging for this title. As it is, Abylight's music app is extremely useful to some, but useless to others, and your enjoyment will likely hinge completely on your knowledge of the electric guitar and its intricacies.